Cobian Backup 8: Backup Bliss!

Posted in Freeware

I’ve been looking for a good freeware backup utility for some time now and I think I’ve finally found something great. With Cobian Backup 8, not only can I backup from my hard drive to hard drive and hard drive to FTP, but FTP to hard drive or FTP to FTP! This is great for backing up my web development work on remote servers. Cobian offers the full range of backup options:

• Full: this backs up everything
• Incremental: the first time the backup is run everything is backed up; subsequent backups contain only the files that have changed since the previous backup
• Differential: like incremental, the first time the backup is run everything is backed up; subsequent backups contain only the files that have changed since the last FULL backup

Obviously, incremental and differential will save backup time, however, recovery may be a bit more complex since recently modified files are scattered across several archives. Depending upon your backup size and how often you modify files, I’d recommend running a full backup once a week so you don’t have too much to piece together in the case of a recovery.

One setting I activated was to run missed backups, in case my computer is off when I scheduled to run the daily backup. Go to Tools ? Options ? Functionality and check Run Missed Backups; I also checked Run Without Asking.

Other notable features:

• Archives can be compressed as a standard zip file for easy recovery.
• Optional system shutdown after backup is complete.
• Exclude certain file types

From someone who has lost files before, if you are not backing up the data you care about, get on that now!

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